TheSociableGeek.com

A funny thing happened on the way to my home page…. They changed it!  Well, kind of-sort of.  When I open up MSN.com on my development PC, this is what I see. It’s much brighter than its predecessor and easier to navigate. In addition, it has added some cool social media integration into the lower right hand corner.

Not only will it show my Windows Live, Facebook, and Twitter feeds, but it will also let me post from here as well.  I know this is not terribly new, but I did not expect it from MSN.com. It was a welcome surprise. 

Here is the funny part, not every user gets to see the new site. As a matter of fact, I get the old MSN page on every other computer in my house. In addition, when I do a Bing Search , I cant find anyone talking about it’s “New Design”. 

Finally, after searching every place I could think of, I found this one reference to it on its Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/msn.com , at the bottom of the page is this one line :

“On November 5 2009, Microsoft released a preview of their homepage and new logo. It’s expected to be widely available to over 100 million U.S. customers early next 2010.^[21][22]”

So, if unlike me, you don’t get the preview and want to see what it looks like, head over to http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx

Let me know what you think.

Daniel

I have finally reached Paris. After 2 planes 15 hours, 3 naps, and a chicken dinner, we landed in Paris in the oui hours of the morning (6am to be exact).  We area staying in the 6th district near Notre Dame and on the way to our apartment, one of the funny things I noticed was how small the cars were, not an SUV in sight. This made a lot more sense once I saw the size of the street were were saying on

When we finally reached our destination, we started getting settled in and when I popped open my laptop, I discovered that the Sensor and Location platform, or more specifically my IP location provider was able to determine I was in Paris and automatically changed my weather gadget to show me the local weather.   The sensor and location platform is one of the cool new things developers can use as part of Windows 7. Although it is very useful for gadgets, it can be used for any type of application that wants to be aware of its surroundings.  Go check it out, you will like it.

Image via Wikipedia

Join me for one of the coolest things to come out of the dev community in quite a while. I will be doing a seminar on Windows 7 Multi-Touch, and SketchFlow.   You can see the Agenda below, but you will really want to see the MultiTouch and SketchFlow stuff.  See you there.

Irvine
September 9, 2009

1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Click here  to register

Event ID: 1032423014

Los Angeles
September 10, 2009

1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Click here  to register

Event ID: 1032423015

San Diego
September 10, 2009

1:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Click here  to register

Event ID: 1032423016

MSDN Presents: The Next Generation Client Experience

Windows 7 for Developers (MULTI- Touch) = Cool

Windows 7 is almost here! With it are numerous improvements and new features to take advantage of in your applications. Watch and learn as we demonstrate how to utilize the new taskbar, multi-touch support and more.

IE8 for Developers ( Showing how to create an accelerator)

IE8 makes your web better… faster, safer and easier.  This is true for developers too.  In this session, we will illustrate how developers can take advantage of some new technologies in IE8 such as accelerators to enhance a user’s web experience.  We will also illustrate the built-in developer tools in IE8 and how to take advantage of them.  These tools include a powerful CSS tool, script debugging and a script profiler.

Building Business Applications with Silverlight 3 and RIA Services

Silverlight 3 has launched.  In this session, we will illustrate how you can build powerful line of business (LOB) applications with Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3.  We will begin with illustrating how you can build powerful prototypes with SketchFlow in Blend 3.

As many of you know, Windows 7 will be released soon to the general public.  One of the feature that you may not be aware of that is built into the Windows 7 OS is Multi-touch.  It gives you the ability to use multiple hands/fingers to manipulate the applications running on your system. In upcoming blog posts (here or on http://www.DotNetDoc.com) I will show you how you create applications using this technology. This video goes through a few sample applications to show you some of the functionality that you can take advantage of in your applications. (And it is pretty cool too).  Make sure you check back for more in this series.

See you on the social scene…. Daniel

I was finally able to bring home the HP TouchSmart IQ816 to begin writing up demos on the Multi-Touch feature of Windows 7. It is a fantastic all-in-one machine with a beautiful 25 1/2” screen built using screen overlay technology developed by NextWindow (Which I will blogging about in a later post). In addition, this bad boy has an Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor 4GB Ram and 3/4 Terabytes of storage.   As you can see, it is such a large machine that I had to take over my dining room table to accommodate it.  Once I was able to get the correct NVidia drivers installed, we were ready to go. I will be posting videos of the coolness of this machine.  In addition, I will be doing a series on how you can use Visual Studio to write code against the multi-touch interface ( although you will find these on my development blog at http://www.DotNetDoc.com) .   Stay tuned for some cool video demonstrations of what you can do with this machine.